Robert Marleau

The Conservatives’ critics inside the government have a remarkably short shelf life

A new commissioner takes aim at Ottawa’s secretive ministries

Colleague Petrou asked the Department of Foreign Affairs for information. This set squadrons of bureaucrats into many rounds of frantic consultation about how to give him the smallest possible amount of information. Read all about it here. It would be hilarious if it weren’t perfectly appalling.

Just as ITQ predicted, it turns out that the most effective way to convince the government to comply with current access laws is to publicly announce your plans to launch a daring daylight document raid on Langevin Block.

Now this would definitely qualify as going out with a bang. From today’s installment of the Toronto Star’s almost-certainly-eventually-to-be-award-winning “Sham-ocracy” series:

Perez Hilton gets punched, Carla Bruni’s biggest fan, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s interesting statue

Because really, who wouldn’t want to fill the Robert Marleau-shaped hole over at the Information Commissioner’s office? I mean, if you somehow end up in the government’s bad books with your stubborn insistence on applying the ATI laws as written, you know the opposition has your back, right? Just ask Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page.

And so Information Commissioner Robert Marleau announces his retirement, prompting a veritable avalanche of how-will-you-be-able-to-tell-he’s-gone jokes.

Vic Toews, yesterday. “This has been the most open government in the history of Confederation and our government is committed to ensuring it remains that way.”

At a news conference to discuss the release of his office’s first Special Report in over two years,  Information Commissioner Robert Marleau won’t just be handing out  report cards (although he’ll be doing that, too, and it sounds like some departments won’t be posting the results proudly on the refrigerator door) – he’ll also be discussing “systemic issues related to Access to Information in Canada”.

Longtime readers of this blog may be familiar with my ongoing battle with the Canadian International Development Agency over an access-to-information request I made in April 2007. I wanted to know about CIDA programs in Zimbabwe, but when CIDA claimed such a supposedly broad request would require thousands of dollars in “research fees,” I narrowed the request to one phase of one program – in other words, nothing too broad or onerous.  

The information commissioner, who had upset some observers with his apparent passivity in the early innings of the Harper government, appears to have exhausted his considerable supply of patience. In an interview with La Presse, Bob Marleau is seen to be “pulling his hair out” over the growing lack of transparency in Ottawa.